Timeout for Opt-Outs?
A new poll suggests that a majority of adults think annual standardized testing is a good thing. They’re not as fond of the opt-out movement.
Americans aren’t as pissed off about standardized testing as headlines often make it seem. In fact, it looks like most of the country’s adults support it. What the public isn’t so fond of are the people who are pissed off—the ones who are so pissed off they’re boycotting the assessments as part of a growing “opt-out movement.”
These are some of the conclusions of a new poll of roughly 4,100 adults, administered by Education Next, a journal out of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and analyzed by researchers at Harvard’s Kennedy School and Louisiana State’s Public Policy Research Lab. The survey results contain important and often counterintuitive insight into what Americans really think about all the brouhaha surrounding education policy.
As indicated by the public-policy researchers—Louisiana State’s Michael Henderson and Harvard’s Paul Peterson and Martin West—these findings are likely to help shape forthcoming education debates on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. The Senate and House will soon come together to deliberate rewrites to the long-standing federal education law that was most recently rewritten as No Child Left Behind. Since its creation half a century ago, this law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), has largely widened the gaps it was designed to “bridge.”
The national backlash against testing has been pervasive and hard to ignore. It’s even gotten teacher’s unions and Tea Party Republicans to join forces. In New York, which is said to be the boycott’s epicenter, 20 percent of students in tested grades opted out of the state’s Common Core-aligned exams this past school year. That’s more than 200,000 kids.
Highly polarized debates over the use of test scores as part of school-reform efforts have stymied efforts to overhaul the ESEA, which was supposed to be reauthorized years ago. Now, Congress is closer than ever to finally doing away with George W. Bush’s version and replacing it with something that gives states more control. But the Senate’s leading proposal—the Every Child Achieves Act—doesn’t reduce the emphasis on testing. And that’s causing major consternation among some Republicans who reason that the federal government’s reliance on test scores for accountability is both counterproductive and universally unpopular. After all, isn’t overtesting a key reason why so many American people believe No Child Left Behind actually worsened education?
For many, exercising the parental right to opt out of testing isn’t only understandable—it’s respectable. The prominent education-policy analyst Diane Ravitch indicated in a blog post earlier this year that if Congress members—and the president and governors and legislators—were to support the opt-out movement, they would be “[hearing] the voice of the people.”
But based on the new poll results, it seems that’s the voice of a relatively small group of people. Only about 25 percent of the general public supports the opt-out movement, while roughly 60 percent opposes it.
The survey findings—which reflect a nationally representative cross-section of American adults—raise questions about the merits of the opt-out movement and its clout in policy talks. Some Senators and Representatives have insisted on rewriting the ESEA in a way that bolsters parents’ opt-out rights. (Under current regulations, schools need to test at least 95 percent of their students.) “The parents know what the system is doing and have a right to inquire,” stated the Republican Senator Johnny Isakson last month, touting the passage of his Standardized Testing vs. Opt-Outs: A Lesson on School Reform and the Future of No Child Left Behind - The Atlantic:
